The Supreme Spirit God

Hard to jilt to jilt the groggy head, water droplets splash, there is a faint salty smell, should be seawater, stinging wounds ache.

Travel and the Pan African Imagination explores the African Atlantic world as a productive theater or space where modernity, racialized dominance, and racialized resistance took form. The book stresses the importance of placing three Atlantic figures—the Charleston, South Carolina-based armed resistance leader Denmark Vesey; the West African emigration advocate Edward Wilmot Blyden; and the Christian missionary and teacher in Liberia as well as the United States, Alexander Crummell—within an Atlantic context and as African world community figures between the late-eighteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The book also examines the religious origins of Black Power ideology and modern Pan Africanism as products of the intense dialogue within the African world community about concepts of modernity, progress, and civilization. Tracy Keith Flemming identifies how travel and social mobility led to the generation of an ever more complex and dynamic Atlantic world and of a fluid and adaptive African world community imagination for those figures who were forced to operate within and against a racially framed universe. The vexing social position and symbolic figure of “the African” was central to the dilemmas facing the racialized imagination of African world community figures and the discipline of Africology.

In Six Stages on the Spiritual Path, we learn about spirituality and its stages as well as how spirituality helps to reduce our suffering and create more love. Writings from ancient to contemporary mystics across the world provide us with practical and spiritual wisdom that will make our lives happier and more loving. In the first stage on the mystic way, children experience awe and wonder, but they do not realize that this is a spiritual experience. While all indigenous people recognize awe as a mystical experience, only some adults and most artists do. When parents and religious leaders teach children about God, they cause their spiritual growth to flourish or to become stunted at an elementary school level. Awakening is an experience of the Divine that helps us realize that the Sacred Spirit is within us and loves us. Awakening produces love for our neighbors and ourselves. Then love nurtures more awakenings. Illumination and union are deeper mystical experiences that the Holy One is not only within all of us and all of creation, but also that we are within the ONE. Illumination creates more love for all people and all the universe.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1882.